​The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe is a novel about an entomologist who goes to the desert in search of a beetle. However, when he arrives to the desert, and there are no insects in sight, he eventually comes upon a village that has burrowed holes into the sand where their homes sit. The man asks for a place to stay, and is brought down into one of the holes, where a woman about his age lives. Though, while the man intends to leave the following day, the woman and the village intend to keep him far longer. Every night, the woman digs up the sand that has settled on the ground, where it is pulled up by other villagers, so that they won’t be buried. It’s a constant and unrelenting task that consumes the woman’s time. The man, having realized he’s stuck in the hole with the woman, tries to escape. First by trying to climb the steep walls, then by trying to dig out the sand so that it slopes more easily. All of his attempts fail, and gets him injured, where the woman cares for him for a few days. Thus, their life follows this routine, with the man trying to bide his time for an opening. Then, about two months in, he ties up the woman and tries to use her as his prisoner, pleading with the other villagers taking up the sand that she will die if he isn’t let out. Though, they don’t head his word. His final attempt at escape comes when he drugs the woman with sake and medicine, tying anything he can find into a rope where the ladders are anchored. When he’s successful in hooking his grappling, the man flees from the hole to wait on the outskirts of the village where he can get to the highway. But as he walks, he realizes he’s hit the center of the village, where he runs and gets caught in quicksand. The villagers help him from the quicksand, but throw him back in the hole with the woman. Then, their life returns to what it had been: digging the sand, in addition to falling in love. The thought of escape eventually falls away, and when the woman gets pregnant and is taken to the hospital while the villagers left the ladder in the hole, the man doesn’t leave.
 
Abe is a master at crafting stories that have elements of strangeness in them. The village that has burrowed their homes into the sand, and now have an endless task before them of digging the sand out, is such an odd but interesting setting. Early on, the man thinks of ways that would stop them from having to dig, but it soon becomes apparent that their perpetual lives are ones the village is not interesting in changing. To me, it can read as an allegory in which tradition, no matter how illogical, becomes the facet for which societies create and sustain meaning. And with the man’s continual attempts to escape, the ending becomes a surprise when he doesn’t immediately book it. In a way, he has found comfort in the woman, the sand, such that he’s lulled into the routine. I also was fully immersed into the minutia of the man’s life, of how the sand must be delt with, how it settles everywhere, and his dwindling hope of ever truly escaping. Abe sets us up in the beginning with the knowledge that the man will have been missing for seven years (and presumably longer), which sets the tone for all the man’s attempts. We know that he doesn’t return for at least seven years, while the story follows the first few months of his life in the hole. Thus, signaling to the reader that none of the man’s attempts were ever successful even as they’re read in the moment. It was a truly weird, but fun read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo Abe is a surreal novel about a man who works at a products company and one day finds radish sprouts growing on his shins. He decides to go to the doctor where he is prescribed a bath in a sulfur lake. Then the bed he is on begins to move on its own volition, which takes him along the street, where he gets ticketed by a police officer for parking on the road in the bed, and is sent into a cave where he is nearly killed by an oncoming train. He then is taken on a boat by the bed along an underground sewage river where his IV bag turns into a reproductive organ of a squid and if it is smashed into another reproductive organ, it creates a bomb. Other adventures include the man going to an underworld tourist attraction where child-demons sing songs to visitors, meeting his mother in the underworld where she has no eyes, a nurse who tries to collect as much blood as she can from unwilling people, killing another hospital patient with nine other people because he was making too many noises, and finally going to a circus where the child-demons pack him in a box where he dies.
 
The novel takes many unexpected turns, and as with the narrator, it feels as though we are the patient strapped to the bed and are brought along to wherever it takes us. There are many moments of surprise, and I particularly enjoyed the way the man recalls the author who wrote about the squid bombs. It’s a weird and fun novel that doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously.
 
Final Rating: 4/5